limestone base and brick-clad upper
floors 175 Apartments 23 Floors
The building has 22 storeys with a limestone base and brick-clad upper
floors. The courtyard contains a fountain and a garden.
Italian Renaissance in design, the Beresford is executed in brick with
limestone and terra cotta trim. Animating the walls is a distinctive blend
of late-Renaissance sculpture: winged cherubs, angels, dolphins, rams' heads
and rosettes.

IN September 1929, a few weeks before the stock market crash, a
three-towered apartment building in late Italian Renaissance style
opened on the corner of Central Park West and 81st Street. It was named
the Beresford, after the hotel it replaced, and was a masterwork of the
architect Emery Roth, a Jewish emigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire
whose background limited his chances for commissions to build on the
posh east side of the park.

The author's father, Joseph, left, at
home.

"And what a creation!" exclaims Andrew Alpern in his book "Luxury
Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History" (1992, Dover
Publications). Two hundred feet square and 22 stories high, the building
had three elegant entrances and only one or two apartments - simplexes
and duplexes - to a floor. It looked like a European fortress, Mr.
Alpern wrote, and was every bit as lavish as the era that was about to
end. Today, in another gilded age for Central Park West, the Beresford
is once again a New York symbol of grandeur.

For nearly half of its 75 years, the Beresford was home to my parents,
Joseph and Marta, and I came to understand over time that it was more
than a residence to them. Although their apartment was relatively modest
by Beresford standards, the splendor made them feel prosperous. Living
there provided a sense of connection to the comfortable, secure life
they were forced to leave behind when they fled the Nazi onslaught of
Europe.

The named Central Park West apartment buildings of the early 20th century,
like the Majestic, the San Remo and the Eldorado, were different from
the numbered residences along Fifth and Park Avenues in that they were
not "restricted," which meant that many of the residents were Jews. In
the 1930's and 40's, these people were what was loosely known as "All
Rightniks," second- or third-generation Jewish merchants and
professionals who were associated with solid West Side temples like
Rodeph Sholom and B'nai Jeshurun. They were a cut below the wealthy "Our
Crowd" set of German Jews at Temple Emanu-El, but they still sent their
children to private schools and expensive summer camps.

As the situation worsened in Europe in the late 1930's, a flow of
wealthier Jews got out, and they too found their way to Central Park
West. My parents were not part of that lucky group. They grew up in
Warsaw and spent much of the 30's in Paris. But they were back in Poland
when the war started in 1939, and only by acts of great daring and good
luck did they manage to escape. They made their way across Romania,
Turkey and Iraq, and found refuge in Bombay, where they lived until
securing visas to the United States.

A troop ship transported them across the Pacific, and in the spring of
1944, they arrived by train in New York. My parents were in their late
30's, my brother, Robert, was almost 13. I was still in a basket, barely
6 months old, with an Indian birth certificate that declared "Caste:
Polish."

Joseph and Marta found an apartment in the Belnord on 86th Street and
Broadway, another fabulous neo-Classical stone pile that had started to
get a little shabby. The rent was about $125 a month for seven rooms,
split among three families, and some of the furniture came from the
Salvation Army. But it was a great place to be a child. There was a
large courtyard where bike riding and ball playing were permitted. Over
time, the other people in our apartment moved out, and my parents, with
what in retrospect seems like amazing equanimity, re-established careers
and even bought a summer home on a lake in New Jersey. It is hard to
believe that they were barely a decade from their harrowing escape.

The Beresford also had its ups and downs. According to "Luxury Apartment
Houses of Manhattan," the building had a hard time dealing with the
effects of the Great Depression. In 1940, it was sold in tandem with the
San Remo Apartments for a total of $25,000 over the mortgages for the
two buildings. Much of the West Side was also in decline and many "All
Rightniks" made the move to the suburbs and the East Side. Nonetheless,
Central Park West still had those fabulous buildings of the 20's, and in
1962, the Beresford became a co-op.

My parents bought their first apartment for $18,000. A few years later
they upgraded to the more expensive 8B - the cost was $40,000, if I
recall - with a better view, one that looked south across the Museum of
Natural History over the park to Central Park South.

By then I was in college, so the Beresford didn't have the gauzy glow for
me that the Belnord did. But for my parents, I now realize, it had
enormous significance. With its ornate trimmings and moldings, the door
and elevator men, the view of the park, the Beresford represented the
lifestyle they had expected for themselves before the war. It had taken
them 20 years to do it, but when Joseph and Marta moved into the
Beresford, they had completed their journey back to where they felt they
belonged. I don't remember them ever speaking about this, yet I know how
important it was for them to reclaim graciousness in their lives to
match the courage and energy they had expended in rescuing themselves
and their sons.

MY favorite Beresford moment came in the mid-1960's when I was preparing
to move to New York for graduate school at Columbia. My mother was very
eager for me to live at home. But after years of living in dorms and
student housing, I was skeptical. "Mother," I said with a clear sense of
priorities, "what if I want to entertain a girl?"

The next day, a Saturday, it was raining heavily, and a young woman friend
came for a visit. My mother disappeared and returned soaking wet moments
after the girl had left. "Where have you been?" I demanded. She replied,
"I didn't want you to think I was interfering with your privacy."

Eventually, I chose to live with two other guys on West 99th Street, where
my share was about $100 a month. But for another three decades, I was a
regular visitor to the Beresford. We celebrated my mother's 80th
birthday and my father's 90th in the spacious living room, dining room
and entry hall. Both of them slept their last nights there before they
died. In so many ways, the Beresford and Apartment 8B was the finish
line for them, the terminus of their remarkable life journeys.

Today, the Beresford is home to moguls and superstars. As an address, it
is more splendid than ever, beautifully maintained and worth every
penny, I suspect, of the millions it costs to buy into it. Every time I
pass the place, I pay my respects to the enduring beauty of the building
and the tradition of urban good living it represents. Mostly, however, I
honor it on behalf of my parents, whose own strength and style it served
so well.
Peter Osnos is the publisher and chief executive officer of PublicAffairs,
the New York publishers.